d pursue their
accustomed round of folly again. The probability is, that though they
assent to your views, they do not understand you. It requires a stretch
of charity to which I am wholly unequal, to believe that beings who
ever conceived, for one short moment, of the height to which their
natures may be elevated, should sink back without a single struggle, to
a mere selfish, unsocial, animal life;--to lying in bed ten or twelve
hours daily, rising three or four hours later than the sun, spending
the morning in preparation at the glass, the remainder of the time till
dinner in unmeaning calls, the afternoon in yawning over a novel, and
the evening in the excitement of the tea table and the party, and the
ball room, to retire, perhaps at midnight, with the mind and body and
soul in a feverish state, to toss away the night in vapid or
distressing dreams.

How beings endowed with immortal souls can be contented to while away
precious hours in a manner so useless, and withal so displeasing to the
God who gave them their time for the improvement of themselves and
others, is to me absolutely inconceivable! Yet it is certainly done;
and that not merely by a few solitary individuals scattered up and down
the land; but in some of our most populous cities, by considerable
numbers.

A philanthropic individual not long since undertook with the aid of
others, to establish a weekly or semi-weekly gazette in one of our
cities, for almost the sole purpose, as I have since learned, of
rousing the drones among her sex to benevolent action in some form or
other, in behalf of members of their families, their friends or their
neighbors. She hoped, at first, to save them from many hours of ennui
by the perusal of her columns; and that their _minds_ being opened to
instruction, and their _hearts_ made to vibrate in sympathy with the
cries of ignorance, poverty, or absolute distress, their _hands_ might
be roused to action. But alas, the articles in the paper were _too
long_, or _too dry_. They could not task their minds to go through with
an argument.

Should the young man who is seeking an 'help meet,' chance to fall in
with such _beings_ as these--and some we fear there are in almost every
part of our land,--let him shun them as he would the 'choke damp' of
the cavern.

Their society would extinguish, rather than fan the flame of every
generous or benevolent feeling that might be kindling in his bosom.
_With_ the fond, the ardent, th